|
There is, obviously, no question here of hands or feet, of any
implement borrowed or inherent: Nature needs simply the Matter
which it is to work upon and bring under Form; its productivity
cannot depend upon mechanical operation. What driving or hoisting
goes to produce all that variety of colour and pattern?
The wax-workers, whose methods have been cited as parallel to the
creative act of Nature, are unable to make colours; all they can
do to impose upon their handicraft colours taken from elsewhere.
None the less there is a parallel which demands attention: in the
case of workers in such arts there must be something locked
within themselves, an efficacy not going out from them and yet
guiding their hands in all their creation; and this observation
should have indicated a similar phenomenon in Nature; it should
be clear that this indwelling efficacy, which makes without
hands, must exist in Nature, no less than in the craftsman- but,
there, as a thing completely inbound. Nature need possess no
outgoing force as against that remaining within; the only moved
thing is Matter; there can be no moved phase in this
Nature-Principle; any such moved phase could not be the primal
mover; this Nature-Principle is no such moved entity; it is the
unmoved Principle operating in the Kosmos.
We may be answered that the Reason-Principle is, no doubt,
unmoved, but that the Nature-Principle, another being, operates
by motion.
But, if Nature entire is in question here, it is identical with
the Reason-Principle; and any part of it that is unmoved is the
Reason-Principle. The Nature-Principle must be an Ideal-Form, not
a compound of Form and Matter; there is no need for it to possess
Matter, hot and cold: the Matter that underlies it, on which it
exercises its creative act, brings all that with it, or, natively
without quality, becomes hot and cold, and all the rest, when
brought under Reason: Matter, to become fire, demands the
approach not of fire but of a Reason-Principle.
This is no slight evidence that in the animal and vegetable
realms the Reason-Principles are the makers and that Nature is a
Reason-Principle producing a second Reason-Principle, its
offspring, which, in turn, while itself, still, remaining intact,
communicates something to the underlie, Matter.
The Reason-Principle presiding over visible Shape is the very
ultimate of its order, a dead thing unable to produce further:
that which produces in the created realm is the living
Reason-Principle- brother no doubt, to that which gives mere
shape, but having life-giving power.
|
|